OneTesla is a singing dual resonant solid state Tesla coil (DRSSTC) project and I’m happy of being one of the almost 1000 backers who pledged for one at kickstarter.

The coil is sent disassembled, but in a few hours you can solder all the components and have it working. The design is great for beginners, as all components are DIP and easily identified. OneTesla also provide great information about Tesla coils, different types, how they work and how oneTesla has been designed. All the boards include a manual/tutorial with a great troubleshooting and oscilloscope screenshots of the different components.

The coil is drive through a fiber optic to isolate it. And you can play midi files from a sd card using an arduino based board.

Unfortunately, the code is incomplete and he was not answering us, so I finally had to write some lines myself. I removed joystick interface and changed it for UART interface. It works quite well with CoolTermWin software.

I wanted for a long time to use laser CNC to do some stuff. So finally I have done this small Conway’s game of life. In case you don’t know, it consist of an universe, in this case pretty small (8×8) cells. Each cell can be dead or alive and the state of each cell interact with the state of the neighbors cells state as follow:

Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.

Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.

Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.

Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

I’m not going to explain in detail what is ESP8266 because if you have found this post I’m sure you already know it. But just in case, it is an awesome cheap board (less than 4$) with built-in wifi communication (802.11 b/g/n), and SPI, UART. You can also use its processor to run your code.

Wiring:

Use FTDI with 3V3 output. If you face problems with this running on Windows check this link: Unbrick FTDI 232R